They legislated a lie: Conservatives need to maintain the rage on marriage

An appeal to my fellow conservatives: please stop congratulating that chap who has his boot on your neck. Even Tony Abbott did it, telling parliament on 7th December, ‘I congratulate the Yes campaign for its victory’ as if the debate about same-sex marriage was a cricket match, not a profound struggle for our families and freedoms.

The Yes campaign shows no such magnanimity. Bill Shorten famously called No voters ‘haters crawling out from under rocks’ while Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews urged a rainbow crowd to ‘get mad and get even’. On the last day of debate, leaders of the Yes campaign in the gallery applauded a reference to ‘the erosion of religious liberty’, which they regard as a license to hate.

This No voter has felt that boot on the neck: vandalism at work, multiple threats of violence, a vexatious case before the Anti-Discrimination Commission, a ban on my book by a major printer, and on it goes. Others have fared much worse, and the harassing of dissenters will only escalate under the new regime. …

It’s about power and cultural Marxism:

For gentle gay couples who need social affirmation, a law for same-sex marriage will bring comfort. But for serious LGBTQ activists, this debate has never been about marriage — which they despise — but about power: capturing the legal high ground from where their full coercive agenda can be implemented.

This ranges from imposing radical gender theory on our kids to passing laws that let cross-dressing males use girls’ bathrooms; from bankrupting bakers who don’t want to write a gay marriage slogan on a cake to prosecuting pastors for teaching Christian doctrine on marriage and sexuality; from removing mother and father from birth certificates to changing ‘husband and wife’ into ‘partner 1 & 2’, as we have seen overseas. Such is the seamless garment of the genderless revolution. …

Monogamy in traditional marriage is part of the package, so the male knows the kids are his. Not required in a gay marriage:

Veteran gay activist Denis Altman … on the same Sydney Writers’ panel as Masha Gessen … reminds us, ‘One of the things about gay male culture is that it is not a monogamous culture’. Q&A panellist Dan Savage agrees, as a gay man, that gay marriage can only be ‘monogamish’. So much for ‘more commitment’. …

Speaking of kids:

As a child of lesbian parents, Heather Barwick writes, ‘Same-sex marriage and parenting withholds either a mother or father from a child while telling him or her that it doesn’t matter. That it’s all the same. But it’s not. A lot of us, a lot of your kids, are hurting.’ Another, Katy Faust, writes, ‘We are just the tip of the iceberg of children currently being raised in gay households. When they come of age, many will wonder why the separation from one parent who desperately mattered to them was celebrated as a “triumph of civil rights”.’

The result will be fewer marriages:

Even Mr Turnbull’s expectation of ‘more marriages’ withers before the data: one hundred scholars of marriage and family testified to the US Supreme Court in 2015 that, in several US states and overseas jurisdictions, ‘after the adoption of same-sex marriage the opposite-sex marriage rate declined by at least five per cent’. This abrupt decline was in addition to any existing downward trend – and it makes good sense. Why would a young man and woman bother marrying at all when their relationship is now no different in the eyes of law and culture to the two blokes and their cocker spaniel in the unit upstairs?